Our discussion of postmodernity thus far has been a collection of stories. Big stories. Stories that added up to an even bigger world-historical story that tells us how our modern world works, or doesn’t work anymore, and where it’s headed into a hazardous future.

Friedrich Nietzsche surveyed the West’s story from Christendom to the modern State’s collapsing cathedral of value and warned us of the nihilism to come. Francis Fukuyama hypothesized that we’d reached the end of history and find ourselves unsure about how to make meaningful sense of it; Immanuel Wallerstein, the evolution of the modern world-system, its ultimate bifurcation and painful age of transition. Jacques Barzun traced the 500-yearlong Modern Era from “dawn to decadence.” All these stories—and they run the left-right ideological gamut—share a common conclusion: Our great big Western world-story didn’t end well.

By the 1960s, the sensation that we’d reached the end of the world as we knew it felt like watching the curtain drop suddenly on a glitzy Broadway musical called The Modern Era! in the middle of Act III. As if the writers went out on strike, left the plot hanging, and our world-story unresolved. Could the replacement writers—postmodern writers—brought in by the producers to finish the show, repair the plot? Or must they write a whole new story from scratch?

What kind of postmodern story could they even write to capture our imaginations, to turn them toward a refreshed new age vision, and to restore our confidence in the world? Not a particularly good story it turns out. Given the time’s confusion—the time of transition from the Modern Era’s dramatic end to whatever will come later—the postmodern story remained at best garbled, a non-story story of sorts. It left us without a coherent world-story to tell about the great big world around us.

It’s easier now, fifty years on, to see how the dust settled on postmodern storytelling. As it turned out, we managed to write (and even worse, to confuse ourselves with) not just one, but two “big” postmodern world-stories.

These are dueling stories describing reality from two different directions. Wallerstein’s apt concept of the bifurcation—a split world—frames the problem nicely. Why? Because postmodern storytelling split apart two of the most basic concepts we have for describing the living world—culture and nature—and told competing stories about them. In our strange, fractured, bifurcated world, these competing postmodern stories divided us into culture-warring camps on opposite banks of a raging river, singing pugnacious anthems around the bonfires.

A world without a clear, coherent, and comprehensive story to tell about how the world works and how we fit into it is a dangerous place to live. Nihilism lurks in the shadows of a fragmented world-story. The Modern Era once told a comprehensive story, a worldwide geocultural story: first about Christendom, then about the modern State. It didn’t always tell it well, and certainly not without bitter reaction both within and outside the West—but told it well enough to provide an ad hoc world order, even if that order was held at nuclear gunpoint. It no longer provides even this.

When we consider the “wicked” problems breaking in upon all of us from the future-present, it goes without saying that our splintered world-story must be repaired to make the world whole again—and in many ways, to make it truly whole for the very first time. Who knows who will repair our world-story, or from whose point of view around the world our new story will be told? But a good new story must be told, if, that is, all of us are to successfully navigate the metamodern Valley of the Shadow of Death.

“Story” might strike us as an odd way to talk about our fractured reality and future threats. Yet, story is so central to how we humans organize reality in our minds that we are lost without a good one. So, before going on to tell our bifurcated postmodern stories—the one about culture (the subject of Essay 4: The Cultural Turn); and the one about nature (Essay 5: Silicon Dreams)—in this essay we need to get our story straight about stories and why “story” is so important in the first place. And in the process, we’ll examine the Modern Era’s central story; what it was; and why our confidence in it was shattered when overtaken by postmodern criticism. 

I. Losing the Plot

Why tell a story about storytelling? Because everything that’s fit to think about ultimately fits into a story. Our thinking is naturally historically ordered. We think in genealogies and lineages and how one thing leads to another until it all adds up to a story that explains our world. That’s how our minds work.

Storytelling—creating narratives—is our natural method for organizing our thoughts and explaining reality to ourselves and to each other. “[It is] an essential feature of human development,” writes historian Lynn Hunt. “Narrative organizes individual memory, the sense of self, and even the individual notion of reality.”

Millions of us obsess over digital news feeds and tweets or sit for hours in front of cable TV opinion news shows. Why? Because we’re desperate for narratives to organize the whirling smog of events and people and speeches. We want stories that explain the world, stories with plots, morals, heroes, and bad guys. And we let the storytellers draw us in. “Words make worlds,” it is said, and once drawn into a compelling story we take comfort in the world it creates—whether the story t0ld is a good faith effort to tell the truth, a conspiracy theory, or propaganda.

Now, there are stories, and then there are stories. We tell little ones about ourselves and where our families and communities came from; stories about our careers and businesses; our struggles and triumphs. These in turn shape our identities and locate us in the wider world. We tell bigger stories about how our societies took shape, how they work (or don’t work) and how we fit into them (or don’t fit in): American manifest destiny, or the fight for civil rights.

Then we tell even grander stories, mega-stories that tell us all in one sweep how the whole big world works. These are Great Big, civilization-sized stories that help us grasp our history from one end to the other. These stories underwrite the values and concepts we use to organize our institutions and the vast cathedrals of value that build our civilizations. To use a postmodern term of art, we’ll call these broadly-shared, civilization-sized mega-stories metanarratives.

Metanarratives are grand, universal stories we tell about the history and significance of, let’s say, the West, or about the Western-driven economic world-system, or about the entire global cultural geosphere. “[B]ig histories,” to continue with the historian Hunt, “overarching stories, or meta-narratives seem to be part of human nature. We want to know where we have come from and we want answers on various scales—of our lives, our nations, our civilizations, our worlds.”

Here’s the catch: Once in a while our stories, even our grandest stories, break down. At some historical turning-point we begin to see through them and to suspect them of illusion. They lose their cultural authority and the consensus that binds us to the same story. Skepticism overcomes us; naturally, we lose confidence in our stories; they lose their power over us; and the fog rolls in.

Nietzsche, we’ve seen, accurately predicted that our progressive civilizational story—the West’s grand Modern Era metanarrative that underwrote the liberal modern State as our central organizing institution—wouldn’t survive the twentieth century. Or even the 1960s it turned out. But also, that this would be a big problem for us because he quite rightly discerned that we wouldn’t have another metanarrative to fall back upon. Not at least for a very long time. In a postmodern situation we would be cursed to live without a story big enough to organize our civilizations, not just in the West but in the world at large.

Two oft-quoted phrases most popularly captured the postmodern sensibility following the 1960s breakdown of the Modern Age’s metanarrative. One as we noted before, was Fredric Jameson’s “the cultural logic of late capitalism,” the notion that capitalism had so captured our imaginations that the postmodern story is really the story of capitalism itself (this claim will be examined in Essay 5).

The second comes from Jean-François Lyotard. Lyotard, a French philosopher and culture critic, in 1979 summarized the postmodern condition as an “incredulity toward metanarratives.” We need to grasp his point to understand postmodern storytelling.

Think of Lyotard’s statement as analogous to Nietzsche’s explanation (from Essay 2) of the devaluation of all values and the ongoing collapse of the West’s cathedral of value. In the same vein, Lyotard argued that the grand cathedral of universal metanarrative that defined and organized the Modern Era’s consciousness had, by the end of the 1960s, collapsed into unbelievability, sundered into a confusion of competing stories. A nihilism of story amidst a nihilism of values.

Prior to the 1960s, many stories that made universal claims vied to dominate twentieth-century Western consciousness. The greatest of these included Christianity; science and the scientific method; liberalism, both liberal democratic politics and liberal capitalist economics; revolutionary Marxism; global imperialism in either political or economic form; and nationalist totalitarianism.

Taken altogether, these expansive, all-encompassing world-stories, despite their competition, merely formed the walls and buttresses of the imaginative cathedral of thought through which most Westerners perceived their world, interpreted it, and found meaning in it. But whatever their differences or similarities, these narratives were integrated into a common narrative by an even bigger story, a meta-story: meta, meaning the story above the stories.

This overarching story—metanarrative—postmodern thinkers generally agreed, was the story of the radical transformation of Western rationality and thought that began in the sixteenth century and continued through the eighteenth. This period of intellectual revolution was called The Enlightenment. It is the story of a consciousness revolution; a story of the consciousness bequeathed to us by The Enlightenment, its legacy, and the changes it wrought in the way Westerners came to perceive the world. This story—metanarrative—of the inevitable advance of reason throughout the world, the advance of enlightened rationality, can with little reservation be called the reason revolution. It is “West-ism’s” core expression.

The reason revolution gave the West’s complex story its inner unity. More importantly, it also gave the Western story its dramatic, world-historical dynamism: A story that packed a walloping punch on the world’s stage. However, the ‘enlightened’ reason revolution was also the story that, by the 1960s, came to feel incredulous, as Lyotard would have it.

We’ll pick up the story of our ‘enlightened’ metanarrative’s demise in a moment. First, though, we need to explain why a metanarrative packs a dynamic punch in the first place. How does it come to dominate our thoughts, to shape our institutions, and even to create a conceptual universe that harmonizes all our other competing stories?

II. Why Story Packs a Punch

Let’s inquire, then, about metanarrative itself, what it is and how it functions, because a metanarrative is much more than a bedtime story, an ideology, or simply a recitation of history à la where we’ve come from and who we are. Metanarrative is story in its most comprehensive sense. It creates a mental universe. Think of it as an all-encompassing cathedral of historically-arranged thought and self-awareness. Like monks, we abide in our metanarrative cathedral; and deep inside its apses and catacombs we live and breathe and make meaning of our lives; stuck inside it like statues of the saints embedded in the cathedral’s walls.

Metanarrative is thought put into the narrative arc of a story. Or put another way: a civilization’s thinking in its step-by-step historical unfolding—a story of collective self-understanding, unfolding in cascades of thought, experience, and memory; its rhythms and patterns scripting a plot to explain history’s meaning, shape, and direction. Think of Jacques Barzun’s narrative “plotting” of the Modern Era’s evolving 500-year narrative: the complex story of the West’s rise, cultural integration, cultural power, and fall from “dawn to decadence.”

A grand metanarrative absorbs the inter-generational currents and eddies of philosophies, religions, politics, arts, and sciences; of consciousness, sensibility, and collective “spirit”; and directs their flows in a single channel. When repeated as story—when, that is, we pause to remember, rehearse, retrace, and retell our social and civilizational histories as they unfolded from the beginning, as we habitually do to put our lives in a context of meaning—we reinforce metanarrative and fix it in our minds. And once fixed, it feels inevitable; producing a structure of feeling (we’ll define this in a later essay) that shapes our sensation of being alive, and that provides the background against which we measure the significance of our ideas and the authenticity of our identities.

Because metanarrative is inter-generational, we don’t choose it; it chooses us. We’re born into it and culturally absorb it from childhood. Seldom do we bother to read the script; rarely do we imagine that we’re acting out a larger story. Even when we intellectualize about it—talk, reason, philosophize about it—we remain caught in its unconscious undertow. Every time we speak—even when we criticize it—our metanarrative leaks out in what we say.

Wherein, then, does metanarrative draw such convincing power and seeming inescapability? Margaret Somers, a specialist in the sociology of knowledge, explains that a metanarrative’s power to convince us—its dynamic punch—plays on two inimitable human habits: One is our psychological penchant for constant internal theorizing about how the world works (we are hypothesis machines; our mental “gears” always turning to explain the world to ourselves). The other is that we invest our confidence in theories that we can prove to be somehow rooted in nature (Mother Nature’s comforting touch assures us that what we think and believe is real). What does Somers mean?

To take our penchant for internal theorizing first, Somers points out that narrative provides the mental structure that we use to explain cause and effect. A good story tells us why this came about and not that. Story, thus, is much more than remembering what came first and then what came next and so on in a sequence of events. In fact, we’re bored to tears by a story without a plot because it doesn’t explain anything. Yet isn’t that how most of us learned history in school and hated it?

Rather, story excites us when it enables us to imagine how the first thing caused the second thing, and the second thing caused the next thing, and on down the chain of causation. Telling stories, then, becomes a methodology for creating a theory of what caused the world to become the way it is. The best stories convince us because they theoretically explain what caused us to advance over time. They answer the question, Why this and not that?

Story arranges the past drama of people, events, and of social and cultural innovations. We constantly tell ourselves stories—good ones and bad—to organize our sense of history. We might repeat popular (if often exaggerated) stories, like the inevitable rise of liberty from ancient Nordic roots through the Magna Carta and revolutions against “tyranny,” political and industrial, to produce a free people—and more particularly, free markets (the “Whig” theory of history, as it’s called, popular among libertarians). Or we might rant about the rise and destruction of the gold standard, the debasement of money, fear of inflation, and civilization’s pending economic collapse (the “Goldbug” theory of the history of hyperinflation popular among investors).

We habitually link history’s complexity in a causal chain, a narrative arc that explains our beginnings, our present situation, and our future expectations. Our future expectations, of course, being the moral of the story. Somers calls this storied drama “narrative emplotment.”

As the plot thickens, so to say, we all—whether eggheads in the seminar room or drunks in the barroom—elaborate our stories with anecdotes and attempted explanations. Story is intellectually deepened through historical and sociological research, and further deepened by analytical hypotheses and reasoned theoretical rigor. By continually elaborating and deepening our narrative accounts we enrich their power of causal explanation and inevitability. Thus, the theory that is embedded in the narrative begins to be taken “just so”—literally. The narrative itself, Somers says, gets elevated to the status (or close to the status) of a scientific theory that objectively portrays what is real, normal, and true.

Throughout most of Western history, for example, the biblical narrative, which was written and elaborated over the span of more than a millennium—and thereafter continually theologically theorized—commanded respect because it comprehensively interpreted the world in a narrative arc. It gave us a beginning (Creation); theorized our ongoing present problems (sin and redemption); and projected the future resolution of our world’s story (the Kingdom of God). Thus, it provided a coherent theoretical framework through which we created art, shaped society, interpreted morality, and philosophized.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, Marxism did precisely the same thing: telling a powerful story of nearly biblical proportions with a beginning (feudalism), a theory of the present (class struggle), and a future resolution (communist world utopia). Both narratives convinced millions because they could explain our past as prologue to our present problems, theorize what troubles us in the present, and promise to take us somewhere better in the future. That’s what good narratives do. 

Yet there is still more to metanarrative than just our proclivity to theorize, which brings us to Somers’ second point, the one about nature. How do we determine, she asks, which narratives are boloney, superstition, or purposefully misleading? We might, from time to time, take mythological tales told around the campfire seriously, but we seldom take them literally. Other narratives, however, we do take quite literally. And we take them literally, Somers points out, because we believe them to be literally grounded in nature.

Why do we prefer narratives grounded in nature? Because we know that all our stories are made up in our minds; ultimately, they are just ideas, cultural products, even if they are very excellent ideas. But how can we know whether what goes on in our heads has any real connection to reality? Well, rest assured, the world outside of us in nature exists independently from our minds and on its own terms, whether we notice it at all, bother to think about it, or tell stories about it. If a narrative can be connected to nature, then it connects to a fixed reality that provides it a proper foundation.

The scientific narrative, as the classic example, presumes (at least methodologically) that material nature is all that exists. Science draws its explanatory power from reducing everything to natural causes—which it can then demonstrate through scientific experiments and technological advances. Seeing is believing; that’s why we trust it. Science’s rooting in nature made it the Modern Era’s narrative gold standard of truth. And the claims of most other narratives to objective reality, consciously or not, try to appear ‘scientific.’

Take ethics and the social sciences: Many narrative accounts claim to have discovered a natural human order that exists within all societies and which preordains how we should live and organize social life—natural law, human nature, social facts. Moral and political narratives based on claims to natural law—like the Declaration of Independence and its famous “all men [sic] are created equal”—take their claims to be “self-evident” because they are founded in nature, hence universally true, and should be obvious to all rational human beings.

The list of claims to nature go on. Marx, for example, argued that the only universal natural law that exists is eternal class struggle between oppressors and oppressed, who continually overthrow each other in endless revolutionary cycles—until Marxist revolution comes to terms with nature and puts an end to revolution. Judeo-Christian theology trumps all since God created nature in the first place.

Somers’s point is that a metanarrative’s dynamic power to convince us reaches its peak at the point that (1) narrative emplotment captures the string of causation so completely that our story is then elevated to the status of a theory elaborate enough to explain why everything is the way it is; and then is (2) proved to be anchored in nature to give it a foundation that is inarguable and irreversible. When a metanarrative reaches this level of sophistication, why doubt it? And we don’t: It’s just natural, just the way things are, and we just accept it as such.

Neither do we recognize metanarrative’s totalizing influence: It encircles us in an enclosure of thought until we come to the point that we can’t perceive the world in any other way. To think otherwise is “unnatural.” Metanarrative, so to speak, packs a devastating double punch: Like a boxer, it rings our bell and knocks the sense into us to see the world a certain way. But it also knocks its opponents—the other narratives from around the world—out of the ring. And this gets us to the problem postmodernity had with the Western metanarrative.  

The enclosure of our world of perceiving and thinking blinds us from perceiving and thinking about the parts of the wider world that don’t fit our metanarrative. And as the Modern Era’s enlightened metanarrative began to break down in the 1960s, it turned out there was plenty that had been left out of the story.

So, with the importance of story itself in mind, let’s return to the question we asked before: Why was postmodernity so deeply colored by its dubiousness toward the West’s metanarrative?

III. The Old World-Story

When postmodern critics popped the hood (bonnet, if you prefer) to examine the Modern Era’s sputtering engine, what did they find? A powerful machine with too many miles on it, leaking oil, belching hydrocarbons, producing as much poison as propulsion. Tear it down to the block and rebuild it, they said in effect—in language calculated to scandalize their forebears—or melt it down entirely and find a new technology to drive the world. And they set to work dismantling enlightened rationality’s metanarrative like an old car.

To better understand postmodern dubiousness toward the Western story, however, we first need to ask a prior question: What was this broken-down story, exactly, that critics felt compelled to tear apart? We need to tell the tale to put postmodern skepticism in perspective. Unfortunately, this is a story too complicated to tell it fully here. Instead, we’ll have to gloss the details and tell a very simplified, schematic version of it—a quick overview of the story that captivated the West for centuries, and that reached its crisis in the 1960s.

In the conventional telling, the story of the enlightened reason revolution starts with Polish astronomer Nicholas Copernicus. In 1543 he published his revolutionary book demonstrating that Earth, rather than being the static center around which the universe rotated, instead revolved around the Sun. Earth (including us) it turned out, is not the center of the universe as medieval theology had conceived it. The corollary thought is, of course, that scientific observation explained the universe in ways that divine revelation cannot; more radically, that intellectual inquiry into the universe should now revolve around observation (science) rather than revelation.   

The Copernican “revolution” in cosmic perspective and its implications for human consciousness, often called the Copernican Turn, was elaborated a few decades later, in the 1630s and 1640s, and given its classical formulation in Holland by French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes.

Descartes posed the crucial question: Where, if revelation and tradition cannot be considered entirely trustworthy, can we find a true foundation for our thinking, a foundation that gives us confidence that we can know truth when we see it? He found the answer within himself.

The only thing I can know about the world without a doubt, Descartes reasoned, is that I’m aware that I’m the one thinking about it. Only I, that is, experiencing Me thinking in my own mind, is the one and only ultimate, irreducible thing that I can truly know. Hence the aphorism: “I think, therefore I am.” Reality begins in my head. Only through my thinking mind can I accept a claim to truth about the world. Thusly, I remain skeptical of everything else outside of me; entertaining universal doubt toward any claims to truth until they are presented to my mind as thoughts that I can prove to my own satisfaction are clearly and distinctly rational and certain.

Descartes applied skepticism to everything, skeptically tearing down and turning away from the claims of institutional authorities outside himself—such as Church, State, and tradition—as foundations for truth. Instead, he placed thinking about truth on the foundation of individual cognition and reason. Doubling down on Copernicus, the universe now revolved around the human head.

But even reasons themselves that are presented to the mind still need to be proven true; that is, they must be rationally justified. But how? To justify claims to truth, Descartes turned to the one aspect of nature that no-one could really doubt. He turned to numbers, to mathematics (specifically to geometry; he, the inventor of analytical geometry and the Cartesian coordinate system) which is ever and always internally consistent and universally true for all times and in all places.

Thus, a thought or a claim to truth that is presented to one’s mind is trustworthy to the point its logic is mathematically pure. Such a proof may be pure math, as in scientific equations that describe natural phenomena (e=mc²). Or similarly, a logical ordering of words (symbolic logic: A≠B) arranged with mathematical rigor, as in philosophy. Either way, once a claim is justified ‘mathematically,’ it can be trusted as true.

Last, since nature itself can be explained in mathematical terms—think of modern physicists explaining the entire cosmos from the Big Bang to its eventual “heat death” through mathematical string theories—it is therefore safe to conclude that nature functions in a rational way, just the way God, Descartes believed, designed it. And since the human mind can correspondingly think mathematically, it is also safe to conclude that nature can be understood by a rational mind.

Believing something akin to the quip great minds think alike, Descartes held that all rational, well-intended people will come to the same rational conclusions about what is true about anything in nature and even in human nature and culture if their reasoning is clear and precise. No need then for revelation, tradition, or institutional authorities to tell us what is true; in fact, we must apply radical skepticism to break down their fabrications and inaccuracies. Truth is constructed from a foundation in rational nature and mathematical rationality. This belief is called foundationalism. Reason is the mind’s perfect mirror of the outer world, and once founded in reason, the whole world opens to us as a logical puzzle to be figured out.      

Descartes’s method of thinking—Cartesian rationalism—revolutionized Western thought from his own time to the end of the eighteenth century, especially in the Netherlands, France, England, Scotland, Germany, and New England, the period historians call The Enlightenment. Reason alone became the standard by which the West could cut through the ‘darkness’ of religion, tradition, superstition, and even emotion to bring the ‘light’ of reason to everything it touched. Subject after subject—nature, politics, law, economics, religion, and so on—was subjected to rational analysis, cleansed of ‘irrationality,’ and reinterpreted (rationalized) along ‘mathematically’ rational criteria.

Rationalism, rather than revelation or tradition, became the final arbiter of truth. And reason provided the operational theory behind the Western metanarrative. The West’s metanarrative itself became the story of the relentless historical march of reason toward a perfect universal humanism: the glorious recentering of the cosmos within the human mind, in the freedom to think rationally, and in liberation from ignorance and superstition—thus, “enlightenment.”

The intellectual revolution kicked off by the Copernican Turn produced an unparalleled explosion in human knowledge and expertise. As the plot thickened, the “reason revolution” set off a cascade of other revolutions—scientific, political, and industrial—and our rationalized, ‘enlightened’ modern world emerged. And as the rationalization of the world continues, who knows but what one day, with enough computing power and “big data,” we might reduce all of life to a single, rational, mathematical algorithm, a grand theory of everything? (Not as far-fetched an idea today in our data-driven cyber world as we used to think.)

For many of us, this story is familiar enough to be unremarkable. Isn’t this simply the way the world works? So then, why, in postmodernity, did we turn up our noses at it to the point we set out to dismantle it?

Why? Because despite the wonders that the story underwrote—and they are many: wealth, health, knowledge, technology, liberty, democracy—enlightened rationality also threw a cold blanket of soulless rationalist skepticism and prejudice over the whole of the human experience. A blanket of prejudice that denigrated our emotions, eliminated diversity, trapped us in iron laws of bureaucratized ‘scientific’ logic, and ruled out altogether transcendence beyond material nature and human reason.

Enlightened rationality always had its critics (often religious critics) long before postmodernity. The Enlightenment itself, by the time it ended, began questioning Descartes’ strict foundationalism. The movement was followed in the nineteenth century by Romanticism, a counter-movement that sought to rescue human emotion, creative spontaneity, art, and spiritual transcendence from the sterility of reason.

IV. Modern Era Consciousness

When postmodernity did emerge, however, its criticisms of the ‘enlightened’ reason revolution centered around several rationalist themes that, when braided together, gave rationalism its conceptual power and punch. And they aimed their critique at rationalism’s greatest influences: individualism, dualism, universalism, progress, and foundationalism (this last will be discussed in detail below). The reason revolution, postmodern critics argued, radically distorted individual psychology and prejudiced Westerners against the non-Western world.

Indeed, there was something psychologically inhuman about the ‘enlightened self’; its high-minded arrogance and its dismissive chauvinism toward traditional societies outside the West. As a Harvard anthropologist has recently—and colorfully—put it, our enlightened rationalism and the culture it created made us psychologically WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic); our “weirdness” setting us apart psychologically from the rest of the world and often over and against it. And here are the weirdest parts of it:

Individualism. Descartes transferred the authority to judge truth from traditional institutions, like the Church, to the self, to the subjective insides of one’s mind. Once he did so, psychologically the “enlightened self” was transformed. Individuals became radically individual selves; self-reliant, self-creating, and self-sustaining selves—self-absorbed and setting themselves apart to independently pursue self-interest; rationally-empowered selves better equipped to acquire property (wealth), or project power.

In the West, individuality—the balance of individual freedom with responsibility for the community—gave way to individualism: freedom from the community and its authority. Cultures that once bound the individual to traditional communities were skeptically debunked and dissolved. By the 1970s, critics lamented the culmination of modernity in a radically skeptical “culture of narcissism.”

Perhaps it made a certain sense to weaken the traditional communal bonds of farm and village so that modernizing Westerners could live freely in the new urbanized, industrialized modern world the modern West built. Cities are, after all, societies of competing individuals. That’s just a different kind of human experience—a bit alienating, perhaps, but we’ve adjusted to it.

However, when self-acquisitive, self-actualizing individualists—psychologically conceiving themselves at the center of the universe, believing they didn’t owe much to others, and disrespecting tradition and community—confronted traditional societies outside the West, the cultural gulf was wide and misunderstanding profound, overwhelming traditional societies with forces as alien to them as if their invaders were from Mars.

Dualism. Cartesian rationality also split the world into two realities, dividing the world “in here” from the world “out there.” That is, it divided our inner consciousness—the thought-world in here that we confidently know subjectively (“I think, therefore I am”)—from the world out there (both nature and human nature) that is known only as an object of observation, reason, and analysis. Psychologically, this subject-object dualism had the effect of holding the outer world away from us at arm’s length: A “god’s-eye” view of the world as if we floated above it, grasping the world “out there” and other people with our minds as “things” lumped into rationalist, analytical (mathematical) categories.

We reduced nature, as well as other people, to objects, to things, to points of data to be categorized, theorized, and understood; and once categorized, theorized, and understood, to be manipulated. Once we objectified the world, we could then control it through regimes of technology and institutions. Learning to control nature was the very point of rationalist thought. And we did so, purposefully transforming the world through revolutions scientific, industrial, political, and ecological. 

Universalism. If truth is rooted in the rationality of the natural universe, then it follows that truth is a one-size-fits-all universal proposition. What’s true is true everywhere, granting no exemptions to other ‘unenlightened’ cultures and traditions who see the world differently (i.e., “irrationally”). A rational world is, by definition, a single global society: its citizens all meant to think the same way—“rationally”—and the whole world must be made to fit into a rationalist, universal picture. In the rationalist vision, there can be only one “city” at the center of the world, a universal city free of ‘unenlightened’ neighborhoods and traditional differences. In this global, cosmopolitan (meaning, “world city”) vision, we all become individualist world citizens, sharing the same global identity, diversity erased.

At the high point of Western imperialism, this argument was spun two ways. The ‘enlightened’ West could rightly expect the so-far ‘unenlightened’ Rest to catch up with its universalist cosmopolitan vision—helped along in the process under the West’s global tutelage (thus: the imperialist ‘white man’s burden’ to bring civilization to the entire world). Or worse, that other non-Western (non-white) races are incapable of full human rationality and thus should be dominated or eliminated in the name of a rational world (the justification for colonial governance, slavery, eugenics, or in the case of native aboriginals, genocide).

Progress. Mixing these ingredients together—individualism freed from outward restraint; dualistic objectification and control of nature (including people); and a universal project to rationalize the world in order unify it and eliminate diversity—makes a delicious cocktail. Drop an olive in it and sing to the glory of progress. Which is exactly what the West did when it got intoxicated on its newfound scientific, technological, and administrative powers unleashed after the Copernican Turn.

One advance led to another, to a string of continual world-improvements that felt like a self-fulfilling prophecy. And so, a story about the inevitable forward march of reason coalesced to tell us that the West alone had straightened history’s crooked path—a linear progression of constant progress ever onward and upward until nature is vanquished and the whole world—its geoculture—becomes cast in the West’s own image. Indeed, the West’s metanarrative packed a powerful, world-transforming punch—a punch that most of the world couldn’t duck.    

V. A World Without Foundation

Postmodern critics found this story of ‘progress’ unfounded and unhelpful. Although, it must be noted, not all of them did.

As the critics gathered under the hood to examine the Modern Era’s sputtering engine, opinions divided. Conservative critics still liked Cartesian foundationalism or some version of it because it felt solid and certain. They suggested merely a tweak to the fuel injectors and otherwise found nothing wrong. We’ll pick up their account of enlightened rationality in Essay 5—the other story in our bifurcated, two-storied, culture vs. nature postmodern account.

But the rest of the critics looked on incredulously (per Lyotard), exasperated to alarm, and cried, Basta! Enough already, this engine’s obsolete—and dangerous. They declared the West’s metanarrative a conceptual trap that, clumsy as we are, we’d fallen into and couldn’t get out—and that trap was spung by the search for, or the claim that the West had indeed found, a “foundation”: that foundationalism is the trick that tripped us into the trap.   

The West’s story, they argued, was unfounded—literally so: No concrete foundations could be detected at the bottom of Western “reason,” neither in God (revealed theology), the human mind (per Descartes), nor in natural law (liberal philosophy). They saw no reason not to be just as skeptical of these supposed ‘foundations’ as Descartes was skeptical of his own received traditions and authorities when he started down his skeptical road in the first place.

The West had boasted that its “well-founded reason” could produce a clear and precise mirror of reality that translated the world of human experience (the empirical world) into true knowledge in the mind. Instead, it found itself looking through the glass darkly; reason (even scientific reason) remained cloudy, imprecise, and without an ultimate rational or moral anchor. Foundationalism, especially as Descartes had conceived it (and even as the Enlightenment and others since had modified it), was in the end only a well-intended myth—not to mention a myth forced upon the rest of the world to devastating effect. 

In response, postmodern critics turned to “non-foundationalism,” to an analysis and interpretation of a world without foundations. Again, Nietzsche was the archetype. Indeed, for Nietzsche, the “death” of God wasn’t simply an observation that Christendom no longer underpinned the West’s cathedral of value (as we saw in Essay 2). This much was well understood. He was pointing instead at a still more insidious problem.

Less understood, Nietzsche believed, was that the “death” of God also marked the “death” of faith in any natural or transcendent Absolute—religious or otherwise—to underpin Western consciousness. God’s death made us skeptical of any absolute at all; we’ve denied the faith, become non-believers. All that remains is radical skepticism.

Throughout the Modern Era the West had found skepticism a useful tool. Rather than taking tradition or claims to the truth at face value, a healthy habit of suspicion put us in the right frame of mind to analyze whatever we found, to unmask it, and to debunk whatever doesn’t meet the standards of reason. Past a point, though, on Nietzsche’s view, nothing is to stop skepticism from debunking its own foundations. Like a snake swallowing its tail, the circle of skepticism curved back on itself to dissolve even the theory of “objective” reason.    

Nietzsche peered from the precipice into the abyss and announced the view truly abysmal: Nothing lay below us, no bottom at all—no “ground of being,” nor “mind behind creation,” nor “unmoved mover” to give order to reality or to build our world upon; only the fumes of the extinguished fire of Christendom’s theological foundations and the raw facts of physical existence. Yet, still, in spite of it all, Nietzsche believed that the human spirit remained wildly alive like curling smoke in the abyss, obsessed to overcome meaninglessness, consumed with desire to know, to grow, to develop.

With its foundationalist illusions stripped away, its rationalist underpinnings gone, all that remains of the human spirit beyond the illusions of “thought” is the human will; the will to overcome our ignorance; the will to climb from the abyss without a floor to put our ladder on; the will to move forward even if we move in the darkness. Nietzsche called this one remaining human reality the Will to Power. By it he meant not political power to dominate (his early critics misunderstood this; the Nazi’s misapplied it), but the will to escape nihilism; to reinvent the world from scratch; to transvaluate our greatest values; to assemble a new, workable life-world by the wild and creative forces of the will—to will a new world into existence out of a condition of nihilism; creatio ex nihilo.

When we come to our senses in our non-foundational age, we’re forced to realize that we won’t be able to replicate something akin to Christendom’s cathedral of value founded upon the rock of our salvation. Rather, like building our airplane while already flying, we must create a brilliant new cathedral in the sky without roots in the ground; we must build a self-produced, socially constructed world out of thin air.

In other words, we will produce life not from abstract foundations, but create life as a work of art, its authenticity measured not by laws founded in nature, but by the radiance of its beauty. Aesthetics, then, becomes a crucial measure of satisfaction with our new way of life: We’re convinced of its value—its “truthfulness”—by the way it leads us to the sublime beyond words. Forget the philosophers, bring on the artists of life, the impresarios of the will to power!

Another form of non-foundationalism also emerged in Nietzsche’s time among philosophers of science—indeed, their work in part contributed to Nietzsche’s “death” of foundations, while his own work contributed to theirs. These thinkers were captivated by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

As non-foundationalist skeptics of ‘enlightenment’ they asked, where, exactly, do our truths and values come from if we can’t deduce them (and never in fact really did!) from some solid intellectual foundation? Where do we get our values, our sense of reality, our common set of “truths”? Could it be that we don’t “discover” them at all through philosophical gymnastics, but rather that we’ve only inherited them from the past? That they merely have been handed down to us, with frequent modifications, through generations in a long genealogical chain reaching back into antiquity and beyond antiquity into the prehistoric mist of the long evolution of homo sapiens?

More precisely, they continued, could it be that culture—the stuff we fill our heads with and that makes the things we do meaningful—is itself a product of evolution? By analogy to physical evolution, then, culture (ideation, values, beliefs, meaning, action, language, even scientific thought) becomes a matter of evolution, of trial and error, of new ideas and ways of life made and tested in everyday life the same way that mutating organisms are tested by their environments.

Cultural mutations arise everywhere, but only the strong survive. Culture and all that goes with it is simply a matter of the survival of the fittest ways of fitting into the world. What fits is what’s true; what doesn’t fit is extraneous and goes extinct.

By embracing cultural evolution, we can free ourselves from the mental prisons built by the “geniuses” of the age and their suffocating philosophical “systems,” their metaphysical abstractions, their “foundations,” ideologies, religious dogmas, and rigid rules about “rationality.” Let’s free ourselves to experiment with life, to come up with fresh ideas and test them through experience. Let’s see what adapts, and let the rest go extinct.

We can also formulate a new test for truth: That the truth of a proposition is proven, not in the abstract, but in the practical; in its beneficial effects on our social lives, adaptation, and evolutionary progress. Truth can be known only in its public enactment—as we embody and act out our beliefs—and proven true through its beneficial evolutionary fit.

And we come close here to Nietzsche’s vision for creating life as a piece of art, to adaptation as the aesthetics of the sublime. The beauty of cultural evolution is its diversity: Human communities in vastly different settings evolve their own sense of life in vastly different ways. We can take our sightings of reality from myriad different vantage points, perches, and angles of vision in myriad diverse cultural settings around the globe.

Amidst all this diversity, we let go of foundationalism and its demand for a single universal view of the world. We don’t all have to see the world same way. Nietzsche called this “perspectivism” (in postmodernity: perspectivalism)—we are united not by universal “facts,” but find common cause in sharing our diverse interpretations of the world.

We might be frightened that all these discrete and independent “perspectives,” “sightings” and “interpretations” may lead to a vulgar relativism—to naked nihilism. But Nietzsche was a cosmopolitan and pointed towards the possibility of eventual synthesis. Yes, sure enough our grasp of reality is plural; each human community provides its own perspective. But then again, let’s think of our separate discrete, plural “perspectives” as starting points, as colors that one day might be composed together on a common canvas—composed practically, tested by experience, in a thing of beauty.

What amounts to a science-based, commonsensical line of thinking came together in the United States during the progressivist era early in the twentieth century. Its most famous proponents—the philosopher and psychologist William James, and John Dewey a philosopher as well as a political and educational theorist—celebrated America’s pluralism of ethnicities, races, classes, life situations, and worldviews, seeing in its diversity an advantage rather than a defect.

Cultural evolution provided the general framework for shaping diversity toward a workable unity—into what James called the “beloved community.” What was needed was not an abstract theoretical “foundation,” but a process to test plural ideas, theories, and truth claims and to refine them and to clarify our thinking about them through ongoing, evolving social experience. This process means putting the truths we say we believe in, to the test in public life and see what happens.

A truth claim is irrelevant, it lacks seriousness, if we don’t put it into action. We must be willing to stake our claim on it in public where everyone can see it at work—and if it produces rotten fruit, we have good reason to reject it as false. Theory and practice form two sides of the same coin: The truth of a proposition is revealed and confirmed in its practical consequences, in the efficacy of its practice in creating—evolving—a better way of life.

Building on this approach to thought-in-action, Dewey went further, arguing that the many different communities in a pluralist society can blend their differences by testing them together in a rich democratic process. For Dewey, democracy was a way of life—the “religion of democracy” as one historian called it—a form of living that binds us together in every aspect of social life, not just an electoral contest. Democratic life drives the evolutionary process forward toward human flourishing. And like evolution’s slow process of mutation, and/or adaptation or extinction, the most practical, usable, and effective patterns of life will emerge through experience.

This practical, process-oriented school of thought—evolutionary and non-foundationalist all the way down—created a vital, new, practical approach to thinking about and grasping reality. In Louis Menand’s helpful summary: That “ideas are not ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered, but tools—like forks and knives and microchips—that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves;” that “ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals—that ideas are social”; that “since ideas are provisional responses to particular and unreproducible circumstances, their survival depends not on their immutability but on their adaptability.” This deceptively simple yet deeply and richly argued philosophy is called Pragmatism. It was and remains America’s greatest contribution to the world of thought.  

VI. Changing the Subject

Postmodern thinking fits easily into this non-foundationalist, evolutionary, and pragmatic mode of interpreting the world. In fact, by the 1970s, interpreting the world culturally—that is, examining the cultural evolution of our sense of reality and the meaning we take from it—began to eclipse the Western search for formal, natural, “scientific” laws in the social sciences, history, philosophy, and ultimately in political life, in order to grasp and to understand the human world of experience.

Here the wedge was driven deeply into the postmodern story to divide nature (the material) from culture (the mental). Arguing from nature, science had led us to believe that everything eventually can be reduced to matter and energy, to physics, to physical properties and laws—including the human mind, subjectivity, society, and culture—to the point of rendering human thought and intentions irrelevant. All we can know is how humans behave as they react to their environments (behavioral science), all the rest (what goes on in our heads) is chemistry and illusion, like smoke rising from a fire. This remains a strong theory in, for instance, contemporary neuroscience.

But postmodern critics didn’t buy it. Culture—the ways we think, create meaning, build societies, and form beliefs—they pointed out, operates by different rules largely independent from nature. There are no laws of human nature to be found, only patterns of adaptation that we can analyze, interpret, and apply to life. Culture, how it evolves; how people create, sustain, and co-evolve with it; and especially how we interpret it; became central to the postmodern vision—even to the point (among radicals) of redefining science itself as mere cultural adaptation. Postmodernity dramatically changed the subject in the search for the real and the true, shifting the subject from materialist natural foundations to culturalist interpretation.   

The most quotable (and likely most quoted) passage in postmodern anthropology sums this up nicely. In his landmark 1973 book The Interpretation of Cultures, anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote:

Believing, with [German sociologist] Max Weber, that man [sic] is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.

The culturally imagined worlds that we spin, of course, are the only worlds that we know. All we know, all we find meaningful—no matter how we have come to know it—is the world we ourselves have spun into existence over time as we culturally evolved and adapted to our environment. Cultures vast and small evolve their distinct worlds the same way, Western societies no differently from the rest.

We may, from time to time and from culture to culture, mutually interpret each other’s “webs of significance”. But we can only compare ourselves and our worlds one to another in order to, pragmatically, share our insights and perhaps build a common world together. Otherwise, we have no foundational criteria—no natural law—to judge one another’s culture as either right or wrong. We all simply possess the worlds and their meanings that we ourselves have evolved.

Then again, what we possess as members of a distinct culture is our world and the story we tell about it—a holy deposit and an indispensable connection with reality. How can we live without our world and the meaning it gives to our lives? To lose it would be to lose the world, to lose everything. To be bereft.

Why, again we ask, did postmodern thinkers find the West’s metanarrative—its story of individualism, dualism, universalism, foundationalism, and celebration of progress—so dangerous? Because it threatened the cultural worlds outside the West with extinction, and doomed their peoples to world-lessness, to meaninglessness, literally to nihilism. The Modern Era, its world-system, its geoculture, snuffed out their worlds one at a time.

The postmodern mood is one of outrage, especially as it is expressed in one of its most important tributaries, postcolonialism, the voice of those forced into the modern world by the powers of Western imperialism at a loss of their own worlds. Let me stretch the point to drive it home hard: How did countless millions of indigenous and traditional peoples experience the West’s Modern Era metanarrative? “I am become death, destroyer of worlds,” quoth Shiva, in his nihilist phase.

Once postmodernity took its decisive turn toward culture, a transformation of consciousness followed, and so did a re-telling of the story of the Western metanarrative and its influence on the planet. And once our world came to be seen in a culturalist light, it never looked the same again—nor has the story we tell about it.

In postmodernity we began to tell a cultural world-story in fragments, a story without a central plot, no longer a metanarrative coherent enough to command cultural authority and consensus. Much, then, is left to discuss, and in the next essay we will pick up the fragmented non-story story of the Cultural Turn.

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Notes

Our natural method for organizing our thoughts. Lynn Hunt quotations are taken from Writing History in the Global Era (W.W. Norton; 2014), pages 40 and 122. In light of our discussion, let’s expand expand her page 40 quote: “[B]ig histories, overarching stories, or meta-narratives seem to be part of human nature. We want to know where we have come from and we want answers on various scales—of our lives, our nations, our civilizations, our worlds. For all the talk of refusing such accounts—Jean-Francois Lyotard famously defined the postmodern condition as one of “incredulity toward metanarratives”—they have a way of sneaking back in.”

From page 123, a longer statement about the ubiquity of narrative: “The ability to narrate is a universal human trait on a cultural as well as an individual level. Roland Barthes insisted that ‘narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative. . . . Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself.’ Moreover, all cultures have overarching stories or meta-narratives, whether they call them that or not, because all cultures have stories about their origins, about what matters in life, and about how they have come to occupy their place in the world.”

Incredulity toward metanarratives. A great four-page sketch providing an overview of postmodernism can be found in Walter Truett Anderson’s The Truth About the Truth: De-confusing and Re-constructing the Postmodern World (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam; 1995), pages 3-6. Lyotard’s “incredulity toward metanarrative” quote is found on page 4. Also, Anderson’s description of metanarrative: “a story of mythic proportions, a story big enough and meaningful enough to pull together philosophy and research and politics and art, relate them to one another, and—above all—give them a unifying sense of direction” (original emphasis). And see Stanley J. Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism (Eerdmans; 1996), pages 44-49.  

Structure of feeling. We will explore this in more detail when we discuss metamodernism in Section II. The concept was developed by British literary and cultural critic Raymond Williams to explain the way our overall cultural consciousness, embedded in metanarrative, causes us to feel and to interpret the world in a particular way. See his “The Analysis of Culture,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, 2^nd ed., J. Storey, ed. (University of Georgia; 1998), pp. 48-56.

Metanarrative’s power to convince us. Margaret Somers discussion of narrative emplotment forms her theoretical framework for an analysis of political economy in “The Privatization of Citizenship: How to Unthink a Knowledge Culture,” in V. Bonnell and L. Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (University of California; 1999), pp. 121-161. I’ve somewhat liberally unpacked her theory to simplify it, but I don’t think I’ve stretched her point.

The scientific narrative. In Beyond the Cultural Turn, Victoria Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (pages 15-16) illustrate the connection between narrative and the cultural authority of modern science: “One important way that knowledge works is through narrative power—establishing authority by means of a story. Scientists derived their authority, after all, not just from their experimental and theoretical successes, which were still in doubt in the early seventeenth century, but also from their ability to persuade rulers and literate elites with their arguments. Those arguments rested on narratives about the presumed conflict between science and tradition and about the superiority of scientific method in unraveling the mysteries of life and death, including even the story of creation. If science prevailed, the story went, then darkness, ignorance, and superstition could be vanquished and progress achieved. Science did not become the standard of truth in the West without a struggle, and that struggle was in large measure one over narrative—over the best account of the age of the earth, for example, with all that such conflicts entailed in terms of cultural authority.” 

A story to complicated to tell here. The story of modernity is beautifully told in 500 pages by philosopher Charles Taylor in his magisterial 1989 book, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Harvard University).

René Descartes. Stephen Toulmin provides a fascinating account of Descartes in the context of his times, his famous search for certainty, and his influence within the wider development of enlightened modernity in Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (U. Chicago; 1990); see especially Chapter Two: The 17^th-Century Counter-Renaissance, pages 45-87. A concise summary of Descartes and foundationalism can be found in Stanley J. Grenz and John R. Franke, Beyond Foundationalism: Shaping Theology in a Postmodern Context (Westminster/John Knox; 2001), pp. 30-32.

Non-foundationalism. On the intersection of Nietzsche and American thought, see Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s, American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (U. Chicago; 2012). And the outgrowth of Darwin’s evolutionary theory in the philosophy of science, Henry M. Cowles’, The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey (Harvard; 2020).

Pragmatism. Quotation taken from Louis Menand’s, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 2001), pages xi-xii; also see his Pragmatism: A Reader, L. Menand, ed. (Vintage Books/Random House; 1997). See also, Hilary Putnam and Ruth Anna Putnam, Pragmatism as a Way of Life: The Lasting Legacy of William James and John Dewey, D. Macarthur, ed. (Belknap/Harvard; 2017); and Amy Kittelstrom, The Religion of Democracy: Seven Liberals and the American Moral Tradition (Penguin Press; 2015). For a thorough summary, see Legg, Catherine and Christopher Hookway, “Pragmatism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/pragmatism/  

WEIRD. Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 2020). Henrich compiled and synthesized a vast array of contemporary academic research in fields as far-flung as neuroscience, evolutionary biology, psychology, field ethnography, cultural evolution, economics, and social history (yes, anthropology really is this complicated these days), to describe the psychological as well as, interestingly, the neurological effects of the West’s cultural evolution; that specific cultural practices “wire” our brains differently from culture to culture.

Culturalist interpretation. Quotation from page 5 of Clifford Geertz’s, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (Basic Books/HarperCollins; 1973). It is here in the first chapter that Geertz coined his now ubiquitous concept, “thick description,” as the antidote to abstraction and as the methodology at the root of cultural interpretation.